Re: [TUHS] Comments on "C"

Many of us who got started early learned that the value of nothing was p&P6. You can write bad (I'm not going to even to begin with sustainable) code in any language. C's biggest defect was it dates from an era where people didn't much care. Type 120 characters into a field expecting 10, well you deserved what you got. It was more the issue with C's utility functions than with the language itself. Most of that has been cleaned up. One piece of aracane programming did come in handy later on. Our highschool didn't have any computers. Your choices were to call the timeshare system across the county using the Bell 103 Dataphones or punch your cards and send them down to the county seat to run on the 370 mainframe (me and a friend were writing a computer dating program in COBOL until someone at the County looked at our printouts and caught what we were up to. Still we'd joke each other by inserting random JCL commands like //OPTIONS ASSHOLE into each other's deck. With a two day turnaround time, that was painful). What we did have is a bunch of old IBM card processing machines: 401 accounting machine, 514 reproducing punch, 085 colator, 082 sorter. On the shelf in that room was a bunch of self-paced training manuals on how to program these units via large punchboards full of wires. Being a geek, I went through these (the 402/514 was an interesting combination, it had the ability via a big 12x80 pin plug to punch the output of calculations on cards). Anyway, years later I was sitting around a university computer center and these guys came in with a problem. They had a whole deck of IBM cards that had patent information on them. What was neat about these cards is that in addition to the punched information, there was a window in the card with a small piece of microfilm with some imagers on it. The problem is that all the card readers they tried to read this deck in would spaz when the optical sensor hit the microfilm part. No problem. Give me the columns you're interested in and I set about programming the 402 to print out what they were interested in knowing. I believe it was the only useful thing I ever did with that machine.